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Obama Announces Education Initiatives at White House Science Fair

Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesPresident Obama watched as Joey Hudy, 14, launched a marshmallow from his “extreme marshmallow cannon” in the White House State Dining Room on Tuesday.

President Obama for a second time converted the White House public rooms into a science fair on Tuesday, and announced new federal and private-sector initiatives to encourage “a nation of tinkerers and dreamers” in science, technology, engineering and math.

After Mr. Obama had wandered like a judge among the science projects assembled in the Grand Foyer and State, Red and Blue Rooms, absorbing explanations from each award-winning student, he said he was reminded of his own experience as a science student and added, “Basically, you guys put me to shame.”

According to a White House summary, in his annual federal budget request next week, Mr. Obama will seek to dedicate $80 million for the Education Department to a $100 million competition – more than $20 million will come from corporations and foundations led by Carnegie Corporation – to support programs to prepare teachers in science, technology, engineering and math, including programs allowing students to simultaneously earn a degree in their subject and a teaching certificate.

The administration had previously set a goal of 100,000 additional math and science teachers and one million more graduates over the next decade. “This is a goal we can achieve,” Mr. Obama said in remarks to the audience of more than 100 students from 45 states, business leaders and science educators, including “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” former host of a popular program on educational television.

A presidential advisory council, in a report also released on Tuesday, said one million additional graduates were needed to fill the expected jobs requiring math and science skills in the next decade. According to the report, fewer than 40 percent of students who major in math and science in college complete their education to earn a degree. Raising that to 50 percent would produce about three-quarters of the needed graduates.

The White House said the National Science Foundation would invest more than $100 million to improve undergraduate instruction practices, including in community colleges and heavily minority institutions. The foundation and the Education Department will each contribute $30 million toward incentives for math education in elementary and high schools.

As for private-sector efforts, a year after Mr. Obama announced a Change the Equation initiative to enlist corporate executives to get involved, the White House said more than 100 executives were investing and participating in 130 programs nationwide, more than half of them in low-income communities, serving an estimated 40,000 students. And the White House highlighted a joint initiative of Time Warner Cable, which it said committed more than $100 million, and the entertainer Will.i.am to challenge young students to invent things with practical applications to their lives and send the ideas to Wouldn’t It Be Cool If.

The science fair had nearly twice as many winners of various competitions nationwide as the initial White House event in late 2010.

Mr. Obama tested one project, pumping a compressor to propel a marshmallow that hit a wall of the State Dining Room, to the amusement of the students. He pronounced another project as “Skype on wheels” – a trash can turned robot intended by its young inventor to wheel around a nursing home visiting patients who wanted to make phone calls. He told one student that her dissolvable sugar packets, to reduce waste, could be used by Starbucks, and added, “Tell me when I can buy stock.” And in his remarks, he singled out three girls who had brought their rocket project from a school in Texas’s fourth poorest district, with help from teachers who held a bake sale at church.

Mr. Obama told the few reporters present to “give this some attention,” because what the students were doing would “make a bigger difference over the life of our country than just about anything.”

Correction: February 8, 2012An earlier version of this post incorrectly referenced a school from which three girls brought their rocket project to the White House. The school is located in Texas's fourth poorest district, not its third.

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